Pakistan's new drone deal is with Trump-backed firm also selling to India Share Pakistan's new drone deal is with Trump-backed firm also selling to India on social media On September 16, a delegation from Powerus, a year-old United States drone company backed by two sons of President Donald Trump, was received by Pakistan's military chief, Field Marshal Asim Munir, at military headquarters in Rawalpindi. A day later, the company announced it had received a "limited procurement order" from Pakistan's Ministry of Defence for unmanned aerial systems. It also said it had signed a separate memorandum of understanding (MoU) with senior Pakistani defence officials. But for analysts studying Pakistan's venture in drone technology, even bigger concerns have arisen from information that has since emerged. Less than three months earlier, the same company had given an Indian defence manufacturer the exclusive right to make and sell its drone interceptor technology in India.

Rogue Studios, a new cinematic adult AI-generator, is betting big on the future of "sophisticated" spicy content. Demand for artificially generated smut is surging . But the quality of the visual content being created and shared--like on companion apps, where adult performers are selling their likeness to give fans a 24/7 experience, WIRED reported in March--isn't exactly movie-level caliber. Rogue Studio, a cinematic AI-generator platform built around adult visual storytelling, is trying to change that. Launching today, the studio, which bills itself as a "playground for creative ethical mischief," plans to deliver industry-level video production without creative and sexual restrictions.

A federal jury is now deciding whether Elon Musk will win his lawsuit against OpenAI and Sam Altman--but the trial has made everyone look bad. Attorneys delivered closing arguments in the trial on Thursday in a final attempt to convince a judge and jury that their respective clients, Elon Musk and Sam Altman, are the most well-intentioned, truth-telling stewards of OpenAI's founding nonprofit mission. A judgement could be delivered as soon as next week, ending a decade-long battle between two of the technology industry's most influential entrepreneurs. But regardless of the outcome, there is a wide set of losers in this case. Based on ample amounts of evidence, it appears that the people worst off are the employees, policymakers, and members of the public who believed in the mission of a nonprofit research lab--and supported OpenAI because of it.

Founders used to be wedded to their companies. Now, anyone can be lured away for the right price. Since the middle of last year, there have been at least three major AI "acqui-hires" in Silicon Valley. Meta invested more than $14 billion in Scale AI and brought on its CEO, Alexandr Wang; Google spent a cool $2.4 billion to license Windsurf's technology and fold its cofounders and research teams into DeepMind; and Nvidia wagered $20 billion on Groq's inference technology and hired its CEO and other staffers. The frontier AI labs, meanwhile, have been playing a high stakes and seemingly never-ending game of talent musical chairs.

Silicon Valley's power brokers spent the past year currying favor with President Trump. Two deadly shootings in Minneapolis are now exposing the price of that bargain. It was November 12, 2016, four days after Donald Trump won his first presidential election. Aside from a few outliers (looking at you, Peter Thiel), almost everyone in the tech world was shocked and appalled. At a conference I attended that Thursday, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said it was " a pretty crazy idea " to think that his company had anything to do with the outcome.

OpenAI is planning to bring over more researchers from Thinking Machines Lab after nabbing two cofounders, a source familiar with the situation says. If someone ever makes an HBO Max series about the AI industry, the events of this week will make quite the episode. On Wednesday, OpenAI's CEO of applications, Fidji Simo, announced the company had rehired Barret Zoph and Luke Metz, cofounders of Mira Murati's AI startup, Thinking Machines Lab. We reported last night on two narratives forming around what led to the departures, and have since learned new information. A source with direct knowledge says that Thinking Machines leadership believed Zoph engaged in an incident of serious misconduct while at the company last year.

Four ways to think about this year's reckoning When OpenAI released a free web app called ChatGPT in late 2022, it changed the course of an entire industry--and several world economies. Millions of people started talking to their computers, and their computers started talking back. We were enchanted, and we expected more. Technology companies scrambled to stay ahead, putting out rival products that outdid one another with each new release: voice, images, video. With nonstop one-upmanship, AI companies have presented each new product drop as a major breakthrough, reinforcing a widespread faith that this technology would just keep getting better. Boosters told us that progress was exponential.

Check Out Highlights From WIRED's Big Interview Event On December 4, WIRED sat down with some of the biggest names in tech, culture, business, and science for a day full of in-depth interviews. In 2024, we brought those talks to a stage in San Francisco for the very first time. This year, we did it again, bringing together AMD CEO Lisa Su, director Jon M. Chu, Anthropic cofounder Daniela Amodei, Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince, and many more. The Big Interview, a one-day, in-person event held at The Midway in San Francisco on December 4, featured a series of in-depth, illuminating Q&As with some of the biggest names in innovation today, each led by a WIRED journalist. We also hosted our take on a modern-day science fair, complete with hands-on demos and other fun experiences.

Thousands of entrepreneurs are trying to rebuild the economy around AI. I set out to see how they're actually doing it. Earth, it's said, is home to more than 10,000 AI startups. The figure is a guess, of course--startups come, startups go. But last year, more than 2,000 of them got their first round of funding. As investors shovel their billions into AI, it's worth asking: What are all these creatures of the boom doing? I decided to approach as many recent AI founders as I could. The goal was not to try to pick winners but to see what it's like, on the ground, to build AI products--how AI tools have changed the nature of their work; how terrifying it is to compete in a crowded field.

Elon Musk last week sued two of his OpenAI cofounders, Sam Altman and Greg Brockman, accusing them of "flagrant breaches" of the trio's original agreement that the company would develop artificial intelligence openly and without chasing profits. Late on Tuesday, OpenAI released partially redacted emails between Musk, Altman, Brockman, and others that provide a counternarrative. The emails suggest that Musk was open to OpenAI becoming more profit-focused relatively early on, potentially undermining his own claim that it deviated from its original mission. In one message Musk offers to fold OpenAI into his electric-car company Tesla to provide more resources, an idea originally suggested by an email he forwarded from an unnamed outside party. The newly published emails also imply that Musk was not dogmatic about OpenAI having to freely provide its developments to all.